The Buzz on “Beeswax”

Andrew Bujalski’s third feature, “Beeswax,” opens Friday at Film Forum (I write about it in the magazine this week); it’s cause for celebration. Few recent films are as canny about the link between economic and romantic lives; few conjure a wide network of personal connections with such a light touch. Cinema Scope features a terrific interview with Bujalski, by Livia Bloom, in which he discloses his method and unfurls his affinities with a similar deftness:

For me, writing starts from hearing voices in my head. My films are quite dialogue-heavy, and I think maybe that’s partially because I hear them first…. I feel like I’m running toward the images, and the way I’m getting there is by listening to the words. The sound leads me to the image….Yesterday I was at an outlet mall and we stumbled into the Bose stereo outlet, where a fine salesman sat us down and made us watch their Bose pitch. They said your television needs great speakers because “pictures tell you what’s happening, and the sound tells you how it feels.” I thought, “Oh my goodness—Bose stereo has just cracked the mystery of cinema!”

The subject came up on Saturday at the Museum of Arts and Design, where I presented Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie” and talked a little about its distinctive sound design. He shot on location with highly directional microphones, which gave the voices an extraordinarily crisp, tactile prominence within the documentary landscape of ambient sound. His method proved influential beyond the cinema: the founder of ECM Records, Manfred Eicher, claims that the film inspired his company’s soundworld. Bujalski’s way of working with sound offers a similar blend of the incidental and the calculated, as he explains:

The great majority of the sound in the film is direct sound, but in editing and in the mix, it’s more about trying to get the rhythms to feel right. I’m often asked, “Why don’t your films have scores?” and I realized last week that I think of the dialogue and the sound of the room as the score. To me, there’s just a rhythm in these communications that are specific enough that I hope there’s a kind of musicality to them. It’s a jazz score, I guess.

This notion alone should propel viewers to Film Forum, starting Friday, to see what kind of swing he gets. (Bujalski will introduce the 7:50 and 10:00 shows this Friday and Saturday and the 3:15 show this Sunday.)

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